Toltec Dragon alerted me to this new game from EA, which appears to be an online strategy game set in the Ultima universe. It’s being developed by EA Phenomic, who made Battleforge…so there’s some fairly serious development firepower behind this thing.

At the moment, there’s not much that I can really tell you Dragons about the game. I’ve signed up for the beta, but can’t seem to log in — the servers are always “full” (or they may not be on yet and that’s just the generic error message being thrown out). Nor can I access the game’s wiki or forums.

And I’m not sure what to think about this whole thing, either. This is apparently supposed to be a broswer-based strategy game, and those generally are far less than awesome (let’s be honest: the best ones are good for a few minutes of distraction, nothing more). At the same time, Phenomic is no second-tier developer…so I’m not sure at all what EA is getting at by enlisting them for this effort.

Would Ultima even render well as a strategy game?

Methinks it’s too early to tell with this one.

Also, Fenyx Dragon noted that Gamasutra had an article up about the game; give it a look.

And finally, from Sergorn Dragon, a possible Lord of Ultima screenshot: